Sony Releases Major Album Solely To Extend Copyright Protection

The New York Times on a dubious and surreal moment in the history of recorded music:

In response to provisions in a new European copyright law, Sony Music has released a compilation of early Bob Dylan recordings [subtitled] “The Copyright Extension Collection, Vol. 1” — that was rushed to a handful of record shops in Germany, France, Sweden and Britain just after Christmas. Only about 100 copies of the four-CD set were produced, with sparse packaging.

The point of the release was to keep the recordings under copyright protection in Europe, where the laws are in flux. A change extending copyright in the European Union to 70 years will be in effect by 2014. But recordings cannot benefit unless they were published before the 50-year term expired. The recordings on “Copyright Extension” were about to fall over that legal precipice.

Many don’t know this but one of the first acts of Jerry Brehmers (sp) when he was put in charge of Iraq was to put a copyright law in place that somehow could never be rescinded. How do you spell Fascism again?

https://sites.google.com/site/themattprather Matt Prather

Lewis Paul “Jerry” Bremer was in charge of the coalition reconstruction in Iraq (he also used to work for Henry Kissinger). Bremer was also the one to announce the capture of Saddam Hussein and was responsible for approximately 10 billion dollars unaccounted for in Iraq reconstruction money.

Very nice, knew some of that but not all. I see someone else is paying attention. Thanks Matt.

JohnFrancisBittrich

Hahaha and it will be all over the interwebs free of charge in 5, 4, 3, 2…

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=742104313 Adam Goodwin

Desperation of corporations is an extremely hopeful sign, imho.

https://sites.google.com/site/themattprather Matt Prather

I see this more as a signal from a powerful corporation that it has a sense of humor about the “rules of the game” that it must live in or else perish to another corporation. And that it is not afraid to “wake up” the consumer slave class to the rules of the system at this point.

Governments are being sacrificed by everyone at this point — the welfare class, the warfare class, the super-human corporations… as well as the anarchists. Sovereign government debt and balance sheets really reflect this. They are being loaded up as “the sucker at the table” in the world of true power.

This album release is a statement on the failure of the political class to regulate the economy, and on the game super-human corporate institutions (which are still ultimately directed by individual human persons, it must be noted) play, in which power and status can ultimately only be achieved through relative (“competitive”) success at satisfying the profit imperative of what the Germans call “Stock Share Societies” — AGs — Corporations.

(Far be it from me to endorse the concept that the political class should regulate the economy to try to engineer society.)

At the end of the day, it’s really the corporations and the people which will be seen to have real-world significance if the money system crashes, not the national governments.

Nationalizations and (civil, regional) wars under old flags may occur, but we should really all ask ourselves where the power in the world comes from. We as individuals give power with our beliefs and actions. Where are we giving and getting power from?

BuzzCoastin

with all the major copyright/fair use violations by Big Media
I not only quit buying their crap
I also quit imbibing their rancid entertrainment